Her rough neighbors saw her near them and (perhaps without knowing that they knew it) knew that that which made her rare and exquisite was of Divine origin. She never hinted covert exhortation in her talk. If she spoke to any of them they could listen without dread of some shrewdly folded rebuke. Yet they could not get away from the fact that she was herself a perpetual reminder of noble purpose. CHAPTER XV. What the cowboys had come, with varying degrees of slowness or celerity, to feel by intuitions little instructed by experience or reasoning, Gore had to arrive at by more deliberate study. He was more civilized and less instinctive. He knew many more people, and had experience, wanting to them, of many women of fine and high character. What made the rarity of Mariquita's instinct did not inform him, and he had to observe and surmise. He saw no books in the house, and did not perceive how Mariquita could read; she must, in the way of information and knowledge such as most educated girls possess be, as it were, disinherited. Yet he did not feel that she was ignorant. It is more ignorant to have adopted false knowledge than to be uninformed. Every day added to Gore's sense of the girl's rarity and nobility. He admired her more and more, the reverence of his admiration increasing with its growth. Nor was his appreciation blind, or blinded. He surmised a certain lack in her--the absence of humor, and he was, at any rate, so far correct that Mariquita was without the habit of humor. Long after this time, she was thought by her companions to have a delightful radiant cheerfulness like mirth. But when Gore first knew her, what occasion had she had for indulgence in the habit of humor? Her father's house was not gay, and he would have thought gaiety in it out of place. Loud laughter might resound in the cowboys' quarters, but Don Joaquin would have much disapproved any curiosity in his daughter as to its cause. He seldom laughed himself and never wished to make anyone else laugh. His Spanish blood and his Indian blood almost equally tended to make him regard laughter and merriment as a slur on dignity. Some of those who have attempted the elusive feat of analyzing the causes and origin of humor lay down that it lies in a perception of the incongruous, the less fit. I should be sorry to think that a complete account of the matter. No doubt it describes the occasion of much of our laughter, though not, I refuse to believe, of all.